Skip to main content

Me Neither



Me Neither is a memoir of the years 1974-88. It celebrates a haphazard approach to building a career in the wake of the turbulent economic circumstances generated by the oil crisis of 1973. It also documents what were in effect the first stirrings of the gig economy. 

Despite the advantage of a privileged education the author's first job on graduating from Cambridge University is as a milkman. This is followed by stints as a bus conductor, stage hand and theatre box office assistant. After a sojourn in the Western Highlands writing a play, the author returns to London and talks his way into a number of jobs in marketing and magazine publishing. This phase is in turn superseded by a move into politics first as a local government officer at the GLC in the Ken Livingstone era and then as a magazine publisher for the Labour Party. 

Along the way there are glimpses of Cambridge, London and Scotland in the 1970s and Germany and the USA at the start of the 1980s. There is an account of the difficulties of magazine publishing in the pre-digital age and about parliamentary procedure in the House of Lords before it was reformed by Tony Blair's administration. There is inevitably some discussion of Labour politics. There are also plentiful references to the popular music of the era, both live and recorded. 

Memoir cannot help looking back and in the case of Me Neither with a certain amount of affection at a period whose stock is currently low. As the sorrows emanating from the Pandora's box of digital technology and a multi-polar world order become ever more apparent, the analog, bilateral world of the Cold War era is inevitably bathed in a nostalgic glow. If there is a nascent revisionism towards the 1970s, then this book is a part of that tendency.


From Introduction, Me Neither






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Event/Horizon

Event/Horizon   is a postwar coming-of-age story, in a broadly comic mode, but touching on darker aspects of the period, as well as on love, loss, and the pains of growing up. Set in Cambridge in 1974, it interweaves aperçus of academic life with those of the local poetry scene, theatre life, and the era’s counter-culture, — rock music, drugs, and casual sex — with all of which its hero, would-be poet Steve Percival, finds himself having to grapple, in his quest for love, enlightenment and artistic fulfilment. Apart from  Event/Horizon  Eamonn Vincent has published a memoir of the 1970s and 1980s  Me Neither , two volumes of poetry  Only More So  and  Even More So  and more recently  Who Was Nightshade? , a comic spy thriller set in the 1960s. All titles are available from Arbuthnot Books. Buy  Event/Horizon  on Amazon.
Post a Comment
Read more

Who Was Nightshade?

  It is summer 1963 , the era of The Beatles and the first James Bond movies. Youth culture is taking over, but the shadows of the Second World War and its demon offspring, the Cold War, still loom, particularly for the older generation. Nowhere is immune to the mood of paranoia, not even the tiny east Hertfordshire village of Fordham Market, where skullduggery, with its roots in both conflicts, is afoot. Through a series of unexpected fatalities, Richard Warren, a well-educated, gay man in his mid-thirties, has inherited not only The Priory, his parents' impressive pile in Fordham Market, but also Wyvern Hall, his uncle's neighbouring, slightly more ramshackle, estate. The only problem is that Richard is broke and his dead relatives seem only to have bequeathed him debt. His old college friend Tony Smallwood offers to help him out of this predicament. But, unknown to Warren, Smallwood is an agent working for the Soviet Union. This is  Eamonn Vincent's  first novel. He h...
Post a Comment
Read more

Eamonn Vincent's books published by Arbuthnot Books

When I published my memoir ' Me Neither ' in 2018 I started a blog in the hope of drawing attention to it. Ha! As if. Even then no one wanted yet another blog or website or tweets about your latest book. The focus had already moved on to Instagram and Pinterest, both studiously averse to textual matter. Now even those sites are old hat and all the action has moved to TikTok and, for the purposes of promoting books, to its offshoot BookTok. Stranger things have been known to happen, but somehow I doubt that Gen Z influencers are on the whole enthusing about Boomer memoirs devoted to the world of work in the 1970s and 1980s.  After a few posts I abandoned the blog and let my little book make its own way through the world. In the absence of any publicity or reviews in the public prints, sales were distinctly modest. I was not surprised, but it was hard not to feel a little disheartened. Perhaps memoir was not my forte. What about writing a novel instead?  Four years later I seem ...
Post a Comment
Read more